I'm not from a political family and didn't grow up dreaming of being George Washington. I started working in 8th grade and have held every odd job possible - working in a gravel pit, weighing big wheelers, ticket sales, data base management - but I knew if I worked hard and got experience, I could apply that experience to my next endeavor.
I had an acting teacher tell me once that if you're playing a car salesman, you don't want to be an OK car salesman, you want to play the best car salesman.
Since the decline of record companies and music sales, I've always played live.
I was living in a small town in Indiana working as a telemarketer and a vacuum salesman. I was really bad: the vacuums seemed to always be falling apart. Every time I did a demonstration, I'd say, 'This is the material the astronauts used on Apollo 13.' And no sooner had that come out of my mouth, something would malfunction.
I'm envious of 'Glee' - artists turned their libraries over for free because they knew it would lead to album sales.
What to do with a leading business that's challenged by a new technology wave without hurting an existing profit stream? The single greatest example of recent memory is Apple's willingness to decimate iPod sales by incorporating all the category-defining product's features into a new gizmo, the iPhone.
So you have to just be really careful and make sure that when a deal comes along, that it's like the right deal for you... not necessarily the most money, because you have to pay the record label that back in like record sales and stuff.
Forty-six years after my parents' journey from India, here I am, the grandson of a spare auto parts salesman and a file clerk, tapped by the President of the United States to be the nation's chief communications regulator.
My dad didn't graduate from high school, ended up being a printing salesman, probably never made more than $8,000 a year. My mom sold real estate and did it part time.
My parents didn't make a lot of money. My dad was not a high school graduate - he didn't have a career as such; he was a printing salesman essentially for most of his working life.
